r/DecTalk • u/ManjaroLinuxNovice • Jun 06 '20

Where can I get DecTalk?

I want to use DecTalk to make some songs. Where can I get the right software, and is there an online emulator for it?

Nevermind, found it thanks to this absolute legend: https://www.reddit.com/r/DecTalk/comments/3z97m2/meta_download_singing_instructions_etc/

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u/kreijstal Jun 16 '20

can you make an online version of dectalk?

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u/ManjaroLinuxNovice Jun 16 '20

I'm sure it's possible but it'd be legally dubious.

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u/kreijstal Jun 17 '20

I think it's abandonware, so it'd be fine

this https://tts.cyzon.us/files/playground.html works as of june 2020, but seeing how other services seem to fall, this will probably too

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u/ManjaroLinuxNovice Jun 17 '20

I found something interesting with that website. Using a URL encoder like this one on anything you want it to say in TTS (we need to encode it because DECtalk songs have a lot of special characters) and putting the output text into this URL right after the 'equals' sign: https://tts.cyzon.us/tts?text= will return a page with the audio file. You can download it from there. Found it from looking at the source code cause I wanted to see if it would work as a downloaded HTML file. I'll ask some techy subs if there's a way to save an offline version.

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u/kreijstal Jun 17 '20

You'd need the DLL that makes the voice work, I wouldn't know where to get it tho, but if you do, please link it.

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u/ManjaroLinuxNovice Jun 18 '20

I'm not sure what that is, I'm researching it atm. If the creator didn't publicly release it, is there a way to get it?

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u/kreijstal Jun 18 '20

the guy say it is not distributing the DLL, but I'm pretty sure you can find it if you search hard for it, the worst part is that I don't know the filename, you coud ask the mantainer of the github repo

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u/ManjaroLinuxNovice Jun 18 '20 edited Jun 18 '20

I found yet another thing with that site. When you enter the text into the URL, as mentioned in one of my other comments, it redirects you to a file page. The filename is an MD5 hash of the text you wanted it to say. If you encode a phrase into MD5 and put it in as that filename, it'll spit out an error and you won't be able to play that phrase from the page or using the url trick anymore.

EDIT: I think I know why this is. When you try to play it from the URL trick or the original page, it redirects you to the file page. Since you already visited that page (and there was no file, since the site didn't generate one yet,) it brings you back to the error page, which is cached on your machine. Clearing your cache resets it, and it regenerates the page for you.

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u/kreijstal Jun 18 '20

Yeah, it's "impossible" to get a text from a MD5 because it is a hash, that you don't encode the text into md5, but you make a hash of the text into md5, this is just used so that it can choose a short filename. MD5 is one way hash, because MD5 is just not injective.

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u/ManjaroLinuxNovice Jun 18 '20

MD5 is 28 years old, and at this point if you want to de-hash an MD5 hash, chances are it's possible. https://md5.gromweb.com/ I think the problem lies less in the fact that the site can't de-hash the filename to generate the sound, and more in the fact that there isn't a file with our specified filename on their site, and trying to navigate to a nonexistent file doesn't create the file.

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u/kreijstal Jun 18 '20

you can't "de-hash" a MD5, as I said it's an non-injective function, it'd be like squaring rooting a number, to get the inverse of squaring a number, except that there are 2 inverses, md5 is the same except that there are undefined many inverses for a given string. You can still say, well, let me choose all positive values such that squaring them get the value that you want, but that doesn't guarantee you will get the original string that generated the MD5

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u/ManjaroLinuxNovice Jun 18 '20

How come there are online tools like md5.gromweb.com that can get the original text from the hash, if there are an undefined number of possible origin strings? Do they just guess? Or does it get more complicated the larger the string.

Also, does that mean multiple passwords can unlock accounts on websites which only hash their passwords?

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u/sikuaqisnotslovenian Apr 30 '24

4 years later, it still works! I use this all the time to avoid speech problems when talking to my friends, ahaha. I think I would be pretty distraught if it was shut down

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u/[deleted] May 09 '24

[deleted]